A Hybrid Approach to Impulse-Radio UWB Self-Localization with Passive Reflectors

This study introduces a simple and cost-effective localization system using a moving ultra-wideband (UWB) radar sensor and passive reflectors at fixed points. Our use of UWB radar ensures consistent performance across various lighting conditions and offers privacy protection. Our hybrid pipeline first predicts the ranges from the sensor to the reflectors, and then predicts the radar’s position from these ranges. Two key components of the hybrid pipeline are a neural network for range prediction and an optimization-based “association” step. The neural network solves the challenge of predicting individual ranges from the mixed radar signal, while the association step matches each predicted range to its corresponding reflector using a novel regularized trilateration formulation. Experiments validated our approach, yielding an average positional estimation error of approximately 0.20 m, making it suitable for human or robot tracking applications. Our contributions include a novel localization setup, an algorithm, and a real-world UWB dataset with annotated 3D ground-truth positions.